So as I grew, I read more and found myself drawn to tales from the 'other-side'. While I know now that this isn't the case, being a young warmonger, reality sunk in that maybe it wasn't like the movies said. Growing up, I was always good with dates and you figure when something ends, it ends, everybody goes home and gets on with living. From the files, it appeared that Herman had tried to stay, but unlike former POWs like Bert Trautmann, he was repatriated and played no part in his son's life. After all, family should get the benefit of the doubt, right? There was a mathematical edge to this, my father was born in February 1948, my Grandfather had not been allowed home for nearly three years after the war had ended. We know very little about my Grandfather, Herman the German, as he is affectionately called in our house, but it set a realisation in me, at 9 years of age, that the movies I watched of bad guy Germans, might not be all true. In true Bone family tradition, this moment passed and was replaced with hoots of laughter as my father, a-typical Englishman abroad, who had mocked my mother's family for years for being German (my mother's maiden name is Eckmire, a name which, ironically, had its spelling changed at the outbreak of the Great War to make it less German), was more German than any of the family that he had married into. A brief moment of shock and pain for my Dad, who was finally learning a truth about his life he had never known. We sat in a dull office and a rather officious woman explained to my father that his father was a German POW named Herman. We visited Barnardo's, where my father had spent a brief period with his sister after they had been taken from their mother. One of the defining moments of my young life happened on a raining autumn day in 1988 on a family holiday to London.

A higher call book